MAD MEN Season 6 Will Premiere April 7 with 2-Hour Movie; Creator Matthew Weiner Teases Time Jump

Ladies and gentlemen, Mad Men season six now has a firm ETA. AMC announced today that the season six premiere of the hit drama series will air on April 7th, with a two-hour episode that creator Matthew Weiner likens to a movie. This is pretty much exactly how season five began, as the show had been off the air for a considerable amount of time and Weiner wanted to give viewers a two-hour episode that played like a mini-Mad Men movie. Weiner also confirmed that season six will be the second to last season of the series, as previously reported. Hit the jump to see what he had to say about heading towards the end of Mad Men and not holding all the “big stuff” for the final season.

“I came in with my plan for the season, I was like, ‘I want to save that for the last season, I want to save that; I want to wait on that’ and I was pulled aside by Maria and Andre Jacquemetton, my executive producers, who said, ‘Don’t do that. You’ve never done that before. Let’s just use all the story that we have and we’ll deal with it on the other side of it.’ It really helped. Because I don’t want to change—part of it is superstition and part of it is the only way I know how to do it.”

Weiner also teased the time jump in season six:

“I am going to skip ahead in time. I won’t say how long, but the first two episodes are a movie unto themselves. And they do foreshadow what’s going to happen in the season. They do tell a story of the period and root you where you are in these people’s lives. But a lot has changed when the season opens up. A lot has changed.”

Break out the scotch and gear up for the Mad Men season six premiere on April 7th on AMC.